Tagged: double negative

September 8, 2008

I had more or less abandoned the idea of this blog due to lack of time, but persistent requests for new posts from Kelly and a few recent comments have gotten me back on the wagon for now. In retrospect, my goal of posting daily was likely over-ambitious, so I’ll try to get to this a few times per week. We’ll see how that goes.

The big news is that the Devour LP limited edition finally came out. I have a few grand sunk into this release, and the goal of the limited-to-100 version was a recoup a little bit of that cash before the regular version hits at the end of September. The venture was very successful. Due to the elaborate packaging I had to sell them for $10, so I was hoping to make about $500 from the 50 copies I sold through the webstore. Of course lots of people ordered other records in addition to the Devour LP, so all told I cleared a couple thousand dollars, which brings the label close to my goal of financial solvency. I’ll still need the regular version to do pretty well, but the limited version definitely takes a lot of pressure off my shoulders.

At the same time as the Devour LP I also re-released the demo cassette for a California band called Video Disease. This actually happened in a very fast and kind of bizarre way. Their tape had gotten a good review in the demo section of MRR, so I emailed the band asking if they had any copies I could distro. They didn’t, but they pointed out that they’d actually sent Sorry State a promo when it was originally released. Whoops! I listened to the tape and it ruled… totally blown-out, off-the-rails hardcore that reminds me of newer bands like Sex Vid and Instängd. I asked the band if they would make some more tapes and they didn’t have the money, so I sent them 100 blank tapes and cases. So, basically, I handled the cash outlay, they handled the intensive labor (man, dubbing tapes SUCKS) and we split the 100 tapes 50/50. They didn’t sell quite as well as the Devour LP, perhaps because it’s technically a re-release, but they’re doing well and I can always sell through tapes… people seem to eat them up more and more these days.

Oh yeah, and the OTHER big news is that the upcoming Double Negative LP, Daydream Nation, will now be a Sorry State / No Way split release. I’ve talked with Brandon and Lauren about doing a split release for ages, and with a lot of their money tied up in their new record store, Vinyl Conflict, the timing was right. Of course I’m MEGA excited to have my name on Double Negative’s full-length. I’ve heard all the songs live and rough mixes of a lot of the stuff and it promises to be their best material yet. Dealing with Scott’s over-active imagination regarding packaging will drive me completely crazy and probably nearly bankrupt the label, but it’ll all work out for the best in the end. Even if I lose a shitload of money on the record I’ll still be proud to have helped release it, and that’s the whole reason I started the label in the first place.

I haven’t posted here for the past few days, but that’s not because of lack of work… the Double Negative vinyl finally arrived yesterday afternoon, so for the first time in a while I have all of my major releases in stock and no orders are being held. This has made that mythical state of being “caught up” seem within my reach, though things had gotten so far behind waiting on those Double Negative 7″s that it’s going to take a few days of hard work get back to feeling comfortable. I already spent about 3 hours packing up orders this morning, and before I’m caught up I’ll have to assemble about 300 more Double Negative records, add a few records to the webstore (this seems like it would be a straightforward process, but I find things sell much better when I listen to the record closely and write an honest, original description), design a new ad for MRR and a few other zines featuring my new releases, send out promos to a select few lucky zines, and finish the Devour master CD and LP artwork. My wife and I are going out of town this weekend so I doubt I’ll get all that done before Monday. There are also a few overdue tasks that I’d like to accomplish, like updating the visual discography on the website with the latest limited editions and fancying up the label’s myspace page, but realistically those probably won’t happen until late next week at the earliest. Still, I’m feeling better about where I’m at right now.

In better news, I found out that the Logic Problem t-shirts are finally printing tonight! The printing place I used is staffed by 2 people… one of them was on vacation last week and the other had to go out of town for 4 days for a funeral, so my order got heavily delayed. I’m not unsympathetic when things like that happen to small businesses, but their communication and demeanor were terrible during all this. I’m willing to overlook a lot in order to deal local, but these guys fucked up.

The next big event on my horizon is emailing my wholesale list to tell them that the Logic Problem EP is ready. Hopefully I’ll have a slew of orders and trades to fill when that happens, but I’ll probably wait until after this weekend so that I’m not barraged with email while I’m out of town. Once that email goes out there will probably be a few days of hell before I catch back up.